Top Nazi war crimes suspect dies at 98

BUDAPEST – A 98-year-old Hungarian who topped the dwindling list of surviving Nazi war crimes suspects has died in hospital while awaiting trial for allegedly sending 12,000 Jews to the death camps.

Laszlo Csatari “died on Saturday morning. He had been treated for medical issues for some time but contracted pneumonia, from which he died,” his lawyer Gabor Horvath said Monday.

Csatari’s death closes the book on years of efforts to bring him to justice, both in Hungary where he was being held under house arrest, and in Slovakia, where he was accused of committing war crimes during World War II.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center alleged Csatari was a senior police officer in charge of the Jewish ghetto in Kassa — now known as Kosice in present-day Slovakia — where he was involved in the mass deportation of Jews in 1944.